Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Stranger Ranger Idea?

The new rumor is that the Mets are considering Rudy Jaramillo, the Texas Rangers' long-time hitting coach, to replace Howard Johnson as the Mets hitting coach.

After adjusting for the fact that Texas plays in a very hitting-friendly home park, the Rangers as a team have hit below league average in four of the last five years; and in the eight seasons of the 00s (20000 through 2007) the Rangers hitting as a team has been below average 5 times, average once and above average twice. Jaramillo's reputation is seriously inflated by the Texas ballpark.Team OPS+ for Texas (100 is league average, adjusted for home park):2000: 972001: 1132002: 1002003: 972004: 942005: 1062006: 992007: 952000s overall average: 100

Now let's compare the Mets' OPS in 2007 before HoJo was named as hitting coach (July 13) to the period after he took over:

Mets OPS before Hojo: .753Mets OPS after Hojo: .800(NL average for the season was .757)

Of course, that's a very small sample, and may have absolutely nothing to do with HoJo, but with that result, why would you want to replace him with Jaramillo, whose numbers in recent years have been underwhelming?(source for OPS and OPS+ numbers: baseball-reference.com)